To grow your mobile app, you must make data-driven decisions with data you trust. With the help of a mobile measurement partner (MMP), you can accurately gather, analyze, and optimize data to make critical strategy decisions about your ad campaigns by first understanding which ads are driving the best ROI. However, finding the right MMP is a big decision for your business. Don’t take it lightly.
In the blog below, we will explore an MMP’s purpose, why you need one, and how to choose one that is right for your business.
What is an MMP?
An MMP — sometimes referred to as a mobile measurement platform or mobile measurement provider — is an attribution solution that collects and organizes mobile advertising data to deliver a unified view and powerful insights into your ad performance across media sources, publishers, and campaigns. MMPs provide an impartial and accurate overview of mobile ad attribution by indicating which ad source should receive credit for driving user behavior.
While MMPs offer deep linking and measurement for paid ads, they do differ from a mobile linking platform (MLP), which provides insight into performance across your non-paid marketing channels. While they both leverage the same deep linking technology and measurement tools, an MMP engages with complex ad networks that require deep links to work differently at times across many possible edge cases. For example, mobile measurement platforms have to contend with SKAN data and each of the numerous self-attributing networks (SANs). This requires them to prioritize fraud reduction and privacy compliance across each network.
MMPs employ a variety of technologies to track and attribute mobile events such as clicks, app installations, engagement, and revenue. The attribution performed by MMPs is typically done through a software development kit (SDK) or a server-to-server connection between your app and an MMP. Ultimately, the goal of an MMP is to help you understand ROI across your ad marketing campaigns and how to further optimize them.
Fun fact: “MMP” was the initial moniker from Meta for their “Mobile Measurement Partnership” program. Over time, “MMP” became an industry category that now includes all key mobile measurement and attribution solutions partners.
The benefits of leveraging an MMP
Mobile marketers rely on their MMP because it makes them more effective. If you want to scale your app, ensure your data is correct, focus on the right users or channels, and know you’re not losing budget to fraud, an MMP will help you get organized. Leveraging an MMP will provide many impactful benefits.
All your data is available in one place
An MMP will provide all of your campaign data across multiple networks and campaigns in a single dashboard. Comparing campaign results becomes much easier, too. An MMP allows you to pull valuable insights so you know where to spend your budget and how to optimize your installs, ROAS, and LTV.
Reliable user-app interaction
An MMP provides sophisticated mechanisms to ensure users receive a seamless app experience when coming from your ad, regardless of their device or platform. An MMP will route users appropriately using deep links because, whether they’re installing your app for the first time or they open it every day, you want to ensure they each get to where they need to go.
Scale intelligently with accurate attribution
With real-time, accurate data at your fingertips, you won’t waste your time and money in the wrong places. An MMP will make sure you get accurate and unbiased data, even when the user’s path to conversion is complex.
Help with privacy policies and fraud protection
Protecting user privacy and combating fraud is now non-negotiable. This means you need to work with an MMP partner that understands and supports compliance efforts with dedicated resources and the technical infrastructure to support a rapidly changing aspect of the mobile industry.
Can I do mobile ad attribution without an MMP?
Anything is possible. However, few marketing teams are equipped with the time and resources to create, deploy, and maintain an in-house measurement platform without the use of a technical partner. You can try to capture attribution by cobbling together data from different platforms and hope for the best, but we don’t recommend going down this road. Some reasons why:
1. Mobile attribution and deep linking require a lot of technical expertise
You will need a team of developers who are familiar with different types of mobile devices and operating systems. This includes knowing how to handle the different types of links that can be created and the data that can be captured, which is very complex. They would also need to constantly monitor the links and data to ensure they are performing correctly while troubleshooting any problems.
2. Broken experiences will negatively impact your performance
It can take weeks or even months to build an attribution and deep linking infrastructure from scratch. And, if you’re not careful, it can be easy to make mistakes. Unreliable deep links or misrouting a user can cause frustration for users that can impact brand loyalty or perception. Lack of accurate measurement or miscounting attribution can paint the wrong picture, impacting your decision-making and marketing ROI.
3. Processing and maintaining data requires significant resources
You can easily spend a significant amount of budget and resources to build and maintain your own data and linking infrastructure. In addition, adapting to rapidly changing industry standards and privacy requirements can be a daunting task, even for the biggest brands. An MMP will work hard to take all the hassle out of it at a much lower resource or budget investment than if you were to go for it on your own.
4. You’ll miss out on unique access to SAN data
SANs typically hold back from sharing all their data with individual advertisers. However, they do provide additional, valuable data to validated MMPs. Without an MMP, you will have a limited ability to combine de-duplicated SAN data from across the different networks into a single view. MMPs de-duplicate attribution across your ad networks by cross-referencing event data, giving credit based on event timestamps to provide a holistic view of your cross-network ad campaigns.
How to choose the right MMP for your app
There are many MMPs around. But you have to know what you are looking for when you introduce a new mobile measurement partner into your marketing tech stack. Not all MMPs are alike. Many cater specifically to the needs of gaming. Others, like Branch, are focused on addressing the needs of omnichannel brands that want to deliver seamless experiences to their users while gaining a big-picture view of attribution events.
When deciding on your MMP, you should think about your users, your marketing campaigns, and your advertising strategy. Here are some crucial things to consider when selecting an MMP:
Accurate attribution
Any MMP you consider needs to provide, at a minimum, attribution insights into clicks, installs, view-through, and other types of ad interactions across all campaigns, networks, and platforms. An MMP has to also support post-install event data such as in-app purchases, churn, LTV, and more. It is all about getting your data however you need it, finding results quickly, and optimizing your campaigns.
Dependable link experiences
An MMP should offer a dependable and trusted deep linking infrastructure that reduces user drop-off with seamless deep linking for your ads. This, in turn, increases the chances of valuable user transactions. MMPs should also give you the ability to easily deploy and scale deep links that handle even the most complex edge cases. Whether it’s a click from TikTok on iOS, Instagram on Android, or any other combination, your deep links should just work.
Seamless integrations
MMPs must interface seamlessly with your data architecture as well as the data infrastructure of your marketing partners. MMPs enable an advertiser to integrate a single SDK into their mobile app rather than the advertiser integrating a new SDK for every ad network or publisher they want to run a campaign with.
Privacy compliance
Protecting user privacy is non-negotiable, and your MMP needs to put user privacy first. Leading mobile platforms continue to change their policies and regulations around ad tracking, privacy, and data sharing on a regular basis. We predict this trend will continue for many years to come.
Fraud minimized at the source
An MMP that stops fraud at the source is critical to prevent a major impact on your analytics and budgets. MMPs should identify fake traffic and installs as well as click bots.
The MMP you choose should make your life easier, not more complicated.
Why should I choose the Branch MMP?
The Branch MMP is designed to meet the needs of sophisticated brands with complex, omnichannel customer relationships. By choosing Branch as your MMP partner, you can be confident you will get the most out of your paid advertising with reliable linking and accurate attribution across all your ad campaigns, networks, and channels. Branch is one of the most trusted MMPs in the entire mobile industry. Along with all the benefits we discussed above, you can also expect the following when partnering with Branch
A focus on accuracy and insights to make you more effective
Branch helps you measure things that were previously hard or impossible to measure. Our intense focus on accuracy helps you more effectively attribute installs, opens, and down-funnel, in-app conversions for your ads. Meanwhile, our powerful dashboard displays your performance with detailed, de-duplicated insights into ad conversions and campaign ROI. All of this rich data delivers insights that allow you to make your marketing more effective.
User engagement and onboarding that just works.
Getting users into your app is hard. Any friction in the app user journey lessens their chance of becoming a loyal app user. The Branch MMP delivers deep links that can be deployed reliably across all your ad campaigns and networks. We’ve worked hard to effectively and smoothly route users across use cases where they would typically disappear from view, such as when passing through the App Store or Play Store or in Facebook. The Branch platform also handles your unique edge cases. Users get a reliable deferred deep linking experience across complicated scenarios, even after install.
Flexibility to put your data where you want it
Branch provides flexibility in how you collect, analyze, and leverage your data. View your data in the powerful Branch Dashboard or export attribution data using pre-built integrations with leading partners for your marketing stack and internal business intelligence systems. Branch has powerful and versatile data tools that can be customized to fit your business needs.
Our proven privacy leadership keeps you compliant
Shield your teams from disruptions caused by privacy updates and ecosystem changes. We understand the mobile world is full of chaos, and Branch carries this burden on your behalf. We have maintained a privacy-first stance even when other MMPs were tempted to stray. To ensure your app is compliant, we build privacy solutions so you don’t have to. From innovations such as SafeTrack™, Facebook install referrer support, NativeLink™, and SKAN 4.0 support, Branch is always future-proofing.
Sophisticated fraud protection that keeps you from wasting money
Our dynamic, industry-leading fraud tools detect and block fraud before it happens with flexible blocking rules, dashboard visibility, and AI-driven rules that capture highly sophisticated fraud. We leverage Branch’s deep expertise and hands-on fraud mitigation support to protect your resources.
Branch is ready to be your MMP partner
As we mentioned earlier, choosing an MMP is an important decision. This decision requires the participation of a large number of leaders and influencers on your team, and it will have long-term consequences for your business, for better or worse. That is why it is critical to always select an MMP with an excellent reputation, a stable platform, a happy and loyal client base, and the resources to adequately support the volatile demands of the digital ad industry.
However, when you do pick the right MMP for your brand, the final result is an attribution solution that improves your campaign ROI and ultimately grows your app. With unified user experiences and attribution across devices and platforms for over 3 billion users across 100,000 apps since 2014, Branch has unparalleled experience and expertise as a mobile measurement partner.